Despite the encouraging and wonderful gains and the changes for women which have occurred in my lifetime, there is still room to advance and to promote correction of the remaining deficiencies and imbalances.
- Sandra Day O'Connor Quote

Do the best you can in every task, no matter how unimportant it may seem at the time. No one learns more about a problem than the person at the bottom.
- Sandra Day O'Connor Quote

I think the important thing about my appointment is not that I will decide cases as a woman, but that I am a woman who will get to decide cases.
- Sandra Day O'Connor Quote

I'm a judge. It seemed to me that it was critical to try to take action to stem the criticism and help people understand that in the constitutional framework, it's terribly important not to have a system of retaliation against decisions people don't like.
- Sandra Day O'Connor Quote

If I stumbled badly in doing the job, I think it would have made life more difficult for women, and that was a great concern of mine and still is.
- Sandra Day O'Connor Quote

It is a measure of the framers' fear that a passing majority might find it expedient to compromise 4th Amendment values that these values were embodied in the Constitution itself.
- Sandra Day O'Connor Quote

It matters enormously to a successful democratic society like ours that we have three branches of government, each with some independence and some control over the other two. That's set out in the Constitution.
- Sandra Day O'Connor Quote

Justice Ginsburg is a very competent justice, and it is a joy to have her on the court, but particularly for me it is a pleasure to have a second woman on the court.
- Sandra Day O'Connor Quote

Most high courts in other nations do not have discretion, such as we enjoy, in selecting the cases that the high court reviews. Our court is virtually alone in the amount of discretion it has.
- Sandra Day O'Connor Quote

My hope is that 10 years from now, after I've been across the street at work for a while, they'll all be glad they gave me that wonderful vote.
- Sandra Day O'Connor Quote

My sense is that jurists from other nations around the world understand that our court occupies a very special place in the American system, and that the court is rather well regarded in comparison, perhaps, to their own.
- Sandra Day O'Connor Quote

Society as a whole benefits immeasurably from a climate in which all persons, regardless of race or gender, may have the opportunity to earn respect, responsibility, advancement and remuneration based on ability.
- Sandra Day O'Connor Quote

Statutes authorizing unreasonable searches were the core concern of the framers of the 4th Amendment.
- Sandra Day O'Connor Quote

The abortion cases produced an enormous amount of mail to my chambers, vastly more than to the other chambers, I am sure. I sometimes thought there wasn't a woman in the United States who didn't write me a letter on one side or the other of that issue.
- Sandra Day O'Connor Quote

The courts of this country should not be the places where resolution of disputes begins. They should be the places where the disputes end after alternative methods of resolving disputes have been considered and tried.
- Sandra Day O'Connor Quote

The Establishment Clause prohibits government from making adherence to a religion relevant in any way to a person's standing in the political community.
- Sandra Day O'Connor Quote

The framers of the Constitution were so clear in the federalist papers and elsewhere that they felt an independent judiciary was critical to the success of the nation.
- Sandra Day O'Connor Quote

The more education a woman has, the wider the gap between men's and women's earnings for the same work.
- Sandra Day O'Connor Quote

We don't accomplish anything in this world alone... and whatever happens is the result of the whole tapestry of one's life and all the weavings of individual threads form one to another that creates something.
- Sandra Day O'Connor Quote

We pay a price when we deprive children of the exposure to the values, principles, and education they need to make them good citizens.
- Sandra Day O'Connor Quote

When I went to law school, which after all was back in the dark ages, we never looked beyond our borders for precedents. As a state court judge, it never would have occurred to me to do so, and when I got to the Supreme Court, it was very much the same. We just didn't do it.
- Sandra Day O'Connor Quote

Yes, I will bring the understanding of a woman to the Court, but I doubt that alone will affect my decisions.
- Sandra Day O'Connor Quote